A peacefull dismantling, if combined with a sharp reduction in military budget and a large upscaling of social services
Spoken like a true Democrat. Reallocating funds from one program to another does _jack_ to fix the debt problem. Our "social services" don't need a damn upscale...they've been upscaling for years, such that they're more than 50% of our budget now. And we already KNOW that communism simply does not work...why in God's name are we funding socialist programs? If you want to fix things, liquidate social security, eliminate Medicare/Medicaid, AND reduce miltary spending...restore the tax cuts for the rich and maybe even raise them higher. Then you'll see a surplus, a massive one, and _everyone_ will be better off.
but what is the point in a budget pc with top grade parts?
There's a very good reason. Reliability.
Some people may not care about super performance, but they still want a reliable machine.
The more you skimp on cost, the more you throw into question stability and reliability. From anything from dirt-cheap power supplies to dirt-cheap memory to dirt-cheap motherboards, you'd be surprised what kind of weird inconsistencies, abnormal behavior, and glitching can be generated (which the average layman will just chalk blame up to Windows). Not to mention mean failure rate on some of the bargain basement components is below abyssmal.
Maxtor hard drives have traditionally ALWAYS been priced below Western Digital, yet WD still maintains a strong following. Why? Because I've _never_ had a WD drive crap out on me. Maxtor on the other hand I've been plagued by failures on and I'll never buy them again to save $20. Similar issues with other components have arisen as well. You can save money and shop on a budget while still caring about quality. Those are the kind of people thats Ars targets. If you're just looking for a dirt cheap PC, go to Newegg and find every obscure brand out there. I guarantee you can beat this price. But I have no interest in investing in Seld-M-Break RAM chips.
Monitor is _included_ in their price and not in yours. That's at least a $100 difference.
Not to mention the speaker allowance they included of $15. Everyone here is fudging numbers to make themselves sound like deal masters when in fact they're just skimping or excluding certain features whereas Ars did not.
Maybe Ars recognized Celeron as the steamy pile that it is and decided to go with a semi-decent processor instead for an extra 10 or 20 bucks.
You're fudging on numbers...the machine you just stated isn't even remotely comparable.
The Ars box has a 17 inch monitor, speakers included, and a CDRW...if you tack those options onto the "$437.94 shipped" computer you priced, you're well over $500.
And on top of that, the computer you priced is a Celeron, which isn't even remotely in the same range of an Opteron 2800+ . Celerons are bar none the shittiest processor ever invented. I swear my old Athlon 1700+ ran faster than my Celeron 2.4 Ghz. Or it sure as hell felt like it.
But face it, it's roughly equivalent. The only difference is that building OEM lets you choose your components, rather than getting stuck with a shitty retail build full of "lowest bidder" parts and crappy bundled software (and often BIOS) loads.
I feel the need to comment on this last part. You definitely put it politely, so please don't feel this whole rant is directed at you, but I get tired of people who slag the Pharmaceutical industry for making profits. The dollars involved in reasearch and development are huge!
But taken to the logical conclusion, human greeds drives health care towards max dollars, not max success.
For instance, why invent a cure when you can instead invent a dozen symptom treatments? A cure may make profit in the short term, but in the long run you're eliminating your profit-maker. But if you make a bunch of drugs that help people cope with the symptoms of a widespread epidemic, now you're talking profit.
Similar arguments can be made in other fields, such as computers, where giant monopolies like Microsoft stymie true innovation for all they're worth to protect their profits. Or the Bells or the oil companies are the same way. Capitalism is as much as bane as it is a boon. It may promote competition and achievement, but it also brings out the worst in people. When only dollars matter, people suffer.
I love um personally. Without um, a game can get dreadfully tedious.
I see cutscenes as a reward to gameplay. Finish a level, rewarded with a cutscene.
Akin to a game ending...would you people also do away with game ending FMVs?
I don't play games to monotonously repeat the same cycle of actions on a slightly different map/board.
I enjoy a good story with a good plot and some cool FMVs add to the experience.
It's funny how ignorant the democrats can be to the same blind bias they bitch about the right.
Only on Slashdot would such a biased subjective troll be modded +4 Insightful and your own objective post left untouched.
In my experience in the IT field, whites/majorities have been subject to more discrimination than minorities. Similar to schooling, being a minority is an ace up your sleeve. If you're talented AND a minority, you're practically guaranteed a job. If you're so-so and a minority, odds are that you're in competition with talented "caucasian masses." The minority card gets played way too much these days. Reverse discrimination (what a stupid term) is just as common as discrimination, if not moreso.
Black people can call white people crackers to their heart's content and it is accepted by society, but if a white person uses similar derogatory slang against blacks, it's wrong. Even simple things like this are glossed over and accepted in today's society, but to me seem to be signs of an ongoing reversal of bias, not an "equal rights" society. The same argument holds with "white history month", "scholarships for whites", etc, etc.
I'm no racist myself. I want a fair world. In this modern day, "affirmative action" segregates, it does not balance things. If you don't want racism, stop spotlighting race. There's no longer a need for it and it just creates tension, hard feelings, and suspicion on BOTH sides of the race line (add in sexism too, as well as any other flavor-of-the-month prejudices). Get rid of special interest everything and stop with quotas and all that other nonsense. Hire people based on their talent and worth. Accept students based on their grades.
I lived with a family of 6 whose yearly average of taxable income of $14,000 (c.2000). We received welfare ($600/month), food stamps ($250/month), and received subsidized rent via HUD ($-400/month). As you can tell, we were below the poverty line.
Your parents were retards and you were made to suffer for it. You should have been taken from your parents and given to a sane family instead of one of neglect.
First of all, if someone is damn near broke in the first place, why are they having 6 kids?
Secondly, that $1250/month in FREE MONEY you just accounted for is nothing to scoff at...that's $15,000 in post-tax income a year...and not even WORKING for it.
I'm not in the poverty category...I'm decently well off. I bring in maybe $3000 a month post-tax, $500+/month of which goes to college debt which I'll be laden with for a good 15 years.
So couple your stated existing ~$1000/month salary with the $1250/month in free money you get, and our "family incomes" aren't too different, especially since my taxes are guaranteed to be higher.
The difference is that I wasn't dumb enough to have 6 kids and try to support them on such a salary.
Lastly, why not get a different job? Higher salaries can EASILY be found, even for the uneducated. Hell, waiters/waitresses easily made that kind of salary circa 2000 PRE-tips. And all the rest of their tip income is under-the-table and untaxed!
There's ALWAYS options...move to a cheaper area (what the hell are you doing living in California?!?), get a higher paying job, have both parents work, stop fucking breeding. Instead, we have security blankets like welfare around to give people just enough leech money to have a few more kids.
The only pity you'll get from me is pity that your parents were so freakin dumb that you children had to suffer for it. They, on the other hand, deserve their fate. Frankly, they probably deserve worse...they're leeching off society and harming children in the process.
You cover two distintly different problems. The drivers experiencing the "disconnect from reality" are normally the ones who don't speed. They "zone out", normally on cruise control, often whilst on the cell phone as well. Fast drivers tend to be more more focused and concentrated on the present, because they recognize what they're doing to be a dangerous activity, at the very least on a subconscious level. Most drivers I know that speed are often thinking 4 or 5 moves ahead of them, mapping passing lanes throughout traffic, looking many yards down the road instead of one car in front of them, and are intensely aware of what is behind them, and what the speed deltas on the road are. Speeders, though often decried as poor drivers, are considerably more alert and aware of what is occuring on the road around them than your everyday "sunday driver." In fact, I believe most speeders to be safe drivers...it's road rage that pushes them over the edge into "dangerous". And I don't blame them. Sitting behind some twit doing 50 in a 65 zone is like japanese water torture. Someone should do a study on the psychological effects and compare the two.
Oh, and speeding...there's also been studies done that show that people tend to gravitate towards whatever speeds they feel comfortable navagating. I don't believe there's this "live in the moment/dangerous enjoyment" thing going on (perhaps for some teens or something?). People do 80 mph on the highway because they feel they can control their vehicle at that speed. And for the most part, I agree with that assumption. We can all go the assinine argument route and say "well what if a wall appears 3 foot in front of you as if from nowhere?". Frankly, things like this simply do not happen. Huge potholes do not sudden appear directly in front of your vehicle as if from nowhere. Either all the cars in front of you are gonna hit it first, or you aren't paying enough attention. On a side note, a massive pothole will cause a horrendous accident at pretty much any speed greater than 30 mph. Would you recommend everyone drive around at that speed all the time in the off chance that a random pothole could spring up from nowhere? Do you stop flying because some planes crash? Do you stop going on trains because some get derailed? I mean, at some point, you need to simply draw the line and acknowledge that "high velocity == some degree of risk" and simply go with it.
That's just the problem with our driving society here in the US: they aren't paying enough fucking attention.
That's half the problem. The other half is just plain ignorance and lack of road manners. Many studies have been run that show that the #1 cause of road rage on the road is obstruction in the passing lane. And other studies have been done that show road rage to be one of the leading causes of traffic accidents. Road rage leads even good drivers to do incredibly stupid things, often if only to attempt to accentuate a point (hence the cutting off). If people would get off their high horses, obey road manners and use a passing lane as it is intended to be used, alot less of the "speed demons" would be raging and there would be considerably reduced accidents.
Believe me, the "wildly swerving, passing on the right, close passing" behavior is not normal, nor do most people who engage in it wish to (I know, I'm one of them). The problem is that others on the road make it impossible not to. If you want to get anywhere you're going at a speed faster than 5 below the speed limit, you need to attempt to pass on the right. Then, if you're in a situation where some jackass can't pick a speed and is increasing and decreasing speed randomly, or passing the guy next to him at.5 mph speed difference, you often need to be able to quickly maneuver through traffic, lest you get blocked behind a fast apparoaching roadblock in the right lanes...how do you think jams occur? A single person makes the left lane completely inaccessible...thus, traffic normally meant for 4 lanes of traffic is forced to converge into 3. This increased congestion decreases the odds of anyone actually passing through the jam, which only increases pileup. Eventually, the entire clog is nearly completely unpassable because a single moron refuses to yield and considerable traffic makes navagiating the right lanes nearly impossible.
Is it so much to ask that a person use the left lane only for passing as it was meant to be? Or hell, if you want to cruise there, at least occasionally look behind you and yield to faster traffic? If you want to be lazy and zone out on the road (dangerous if you ask me), don't do it in the fast lane. It's very simple...if you look to your right and you aren't passing anybody, you better not be in the left lane. Nothing amazes me more when someone is in the passing lane and an entire STACK of cars passes them on the right...then you look behind you, and lo and behold, they STILL are sitting there in the left lane, having not gotten the picture. Frankly, I believe it's ignorance. Sheer ignorance. Or maybe senility. At any rate, they don't belong on the road.
Re:You had better jump on this right away...
on
Getting Off NetHack?
·
· Score: 1
Your girlfriend is in a dark room. She is most likely being eaten by a grue.
I've been running an AMD 2400+ for a few years now, a simple 100$ processor, and I STILL haven't found a game that it can't run solidly.
Try F.E.A.R at 1600x1200 resolution w/ all details on high.
Believe me, software has most certainly outpaced hardware. Now you yourself might be happy playing all your games at 800 x 600 with medium detail, no shadows, and no anti-aliasing, but some ppl like the immersive experience. They're the same kind of people who are into HD everything and multi-speaker surround sound.
Now, while I agree spending this kind of money on a processor is utterly ridiculous (I have a 3000+ myself), I also don't believe newer games wouldn't take advantage of faster processors (or faster GPUs for that matter...they sorta go hand-in-hand).
For the last 25 years you have been voting for a Police State. And now that's exactly what you have. Congratulations, Democracy really works.
Now shut up, bend over and take it like a man.
On the contrary, this is precisely where democracy fails. Two party systems and "package deals" (ala "platforms") force us to take the bad with the good. You pick the issue most important to you and swallow the rest of the bitterness.
So, in my example, if the current administration manages to blow a hole in (and the sink) the assinine Social Security program and/or Medicare/Medicaid/Welfare while they're at it, I'll consider the restricted freedoms a decent trade for all my wasted money. Then I'll vote for a democrat to get the freedoms back, and pray they don't go gungho on Communistic programs again.
Well, for one, the poster of this submission states that optional garbage collection IS one of the proposed additions in C++0x, so I don't know where this complaint is coming from. On top of that, if you really did want the equivalent of garbage collection, just use Boost smart pointers for any heap allocations.
the lack of import declarations
Why should this require language changes? Just get (or develop) an IDE that generates the headers for you. Problem solved. This seems like more laziness. There's perfectly sensible reasons to separate the headers from the code.
no properties
Just make class variables protected or public and access them directly. Accessors really are not that important. Frankly, I don't believe in encapsulation for the sake of encapsulation. Most of the time, it simply obfuscates things. Hell, most of the reason I can't stand java to this day is because I tired of dealing with constructs like this:
It's bad enough that Java is too stupid to auto-cast Integers and "int" when it has hundreds of functions that deal exclusively with each. At least if the Integer class had the "int" variable not within a damn accessor, each line of my code might actually be shorter than 80 chars *smirk*
No closures
It is possible to carry over functional programming style into C++, including closures, lambda-expressions, and currying. It's just not pretty. And honestly, I see no reason for it being there. C++ is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a functional programming language. Why not just code in Scheme or Ocaml if that's what you want? Most C programmers can't stand the sight of those constructs.
For example, a button with an optional bitmap would be constructed in one line of code, like this: new Button(parent = mainWindow, text = "hello world", bitmap = bitmap1, click = {mainWindow.close()});.
How is that any different than "new Button(mainWindow, "hello world", bitmap1, &mainWindow.close)", with a single constructor on the backend? And if you really wanted to allow for a dynamic situation, what's wrong with instantiating an object and then manually assigning the values? You could even put them all on one line if you wanted: myButton = newButton(); myButton.text = "hellow world", etc etc...
C++ could have been the dominant language, if it was not for the stubborness of the C++ committee to accept that programming languages are developed based on what the world needs, and not on what a few good men know.
Many of your complaints seem to stem from the fact that alot of functional dogma has not carried over into C++ (such as continuations and closures). Last I recall, functional programming represented a very small subset of the programming populace ("what a few good men know"). Most programmers simply don't think that way. Anyways, most problems that call for a functional solution are better done in other languages anyways.
Alot of the other things you mention would be nice though.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like a true Democrat. Reallocating funds from one program to another does _jack_ to fix the debt problem. Our "social services" don't need a damn upscale...they've been upscaling for years, such that they're more than 50% of our budget now. And we already KNOW that communism simply does not work...why in God's name are we funding socialist programs? If you want to fix things, liquidate social security, eliminate Medicare/Medicaid, AND reduce miltary spending...restore the tax cuts for the rich and maybe even raise them higher. Then you'll see a surplus, a massive one, and _everyone_ will be better off.
There's a very good reason. Reliability.
Some people may not care about super performance, but they still want a reliable machine.
The more you skimp on cost, the more you throw into question stability and reliability. From anything from dirt-cheap power supplies to dirt-cheap memory to dirt-cheap motherboards, you'd be surprised what kind of weird inconsistencies, abnormal behavior, and glitching can be generated (which the average layman will just chalk blame up to Windows). Not to mention mean failure rate on some of the bargain basement components is below abyssmal.
Maxtor hard drives have traditionally ALWAYS been priced below Western Digital, yet WD still maintains a strong following. Why? Because I've _never_ had a WD drive crap out on me. Maxtor on the other hand I've been plagued by failures on and I'll never buy them again to save $20. Similar issues with other components have arisen as well. You can save money and shop on a budget while still caring about quality. Those are the kind of people thats Ars targets. If you're just looking for a dirt cheap PC, go to Newegg and find every obscure brand out there. I guarantee you can beat this price. But I have no interest in investing in Seld-M-Break RAM chips.
Throw in the $15 speakers that you're short and you're in the exact same price range.
The Sempron 2800+ also marginally outperforms the P4 521.
Monitor is _included_ in their price and not in yours. That's at least a $100 difference.
Not to mention the speaker allowance they included of $15. Everyone here is fudging numbers to make themselves sound like deal masters when in fact they're just skimping or excluding certain features whereas Ars did not.
Maybe Ars recognized Celeron as the steamy pile that it is and decided to go with a semi-decent processor instead for an extra 10 or 20 bucks.
But face it, it's roughly equivalent. The only difference is that building OEM lets you choose your components, rather than getting stuck with a shitty retail build full of "lowest bidder" parts and crappy bundled software (and often BIOS) loads.
But taken to the logical conclusion, human greeds drives health care towards max dollars, not max success.
For instance, why invent a cure when you can instead invent a dozen symptom treatments? A cure may make profit in the short term, but in the long run you're eliminating your profit-maker. But if you make a bunch of drugs that help people cope with the symptoms of a widespread epidemic, now you're talking profit.
Similar arguments can be made in other fields, such as computers, where giant monopolies like Microsoft stymie true innovation for all they're worth to protect their profits. Or the Bells or the oil companies are the same way. Capitalism is as much as bane as it is a boon. It may promote competition and achievement, but it also brings out the worst in people. When only dollars matter, people suffer.
Well as true as that might be, part of me was yelling:
Cast Life2 on her, you dumb ass!
I love um personally. Without um, a game can get dreadfully tedious. I see cutscenes as a reward to gameplay. Finish a level, rewarded with a cutscene. Akin to a game ending...would you people also do away with game ending FMVs? I don't play games to monotonously repeat the same cycle of actions on a slightly different map/board. I enjoy a good story with a good plot and some cool FMVs add to the experience.
Mood selling...shares have since rebounded more than 10% in a single day and are looking to continue to climb.
It's funny how ignorant the democrats can be to the same blind bias they bitch about the right.
Only on Slashdot would such a biased subjective troll be modded +4 Insightful and your own objective post left untouched.
You might want to consider a different husband too...your current one sounds like a lazy deadbeat.
Black people can call white people crackers to their heart's content and it is accepted by society, but if a white person uses similar derogatory slang against blacks, it's wrong. Even simple things like this are glossed over and accepted in today's society, but to me seem to be signs of an ongoing reversal of bias, not an "equal rights" society. The same argument holds with "white history month", "scholarships for whites", etc, etc.
I'm no racist myself. I want a fair world. In this modern day, "affirmative action" segregates, it does not balance things. If you don't want racism, stop spotlighting race. There's no longer a need for it and it just creates tension, hard feelings, and suspicion on BOTH sides of the race line (add in sexism too, as well as any other flavor-of-the-month prejudices). Get rid of special interest everything and stop with quotas and all that other nonsense. Hire people based on their talent and worth. Accept students based on their grades.
People are people. Judge them as such.
You're a CS grad? HA! You nitwit :)
No way, no one thinks they understand women, not even women themselves.
Your parents were retards and you were made to suffer for it. You should have been taken from your parents and given to a sane family instead of one of neglect.
First of all, if someone is damn near broke in the first place, why are they having 6 kids?
Secondly, that $1250/month in FREE MONEY you just accounted for is nothing to scoff at...that's $15,000 in post-tax income a year...and not even WORKING for it.
I'm not in the poverty category...I'm decently well off. I bring in maybe $3000 a month post-tax, $500+/month of which goes to college debt which I'll be laden with for a good 15 years.
So couple your stated existing ~$1000/month salary with the $1250/month in free money you get, and our "family incomes" aren't too different, especially since my taxes are guaranteed to be higher.
The difference is that I wasn't dumb enough to have 6 kids and try to support them on such a salary.
Lastly, why not get a different job? Higher salaries can EASILY be found, even for the uneducated. Hell, waiters/waitresses easily made that kind of salary circa 2000 PRE-tips. And all the rest of their tip income is under-the-table and untaxed!
There's ALWAYS options...move to a cheaper area (what the hell are you doing living in California?!?), get a higher paying job, have both parents work, stop fucking breeding.
Instead, we have security blankets like welfare around to give people just enough leech money to have a few more kids.
The only pity you'll get from me is pity that your parents were so freakin dumb that you children had to suffer for it.
They, on the other hand, deserve their fate. Frankly, they probably deserve worse...they're leeching off society and harming children in the process.
Oh, and speeding...there's also been studies done that show that people tend to gravitate towards whatever speeds they feel comfortable navagating. I don't believe there's this "live in the moment/dangerous enjoyment" thing going on (perhaps for some teens or something?). People do 80 mph on the highway because they feel they can control their vehicle at that speed. And for the most part, I agree with that assumption. We can all go the assinine argument route and say "well what if a wall appears 3 foot in front of you as if from nowhere?". Frankly, things like this simply do not happen. Huge potholes do not sudden appear directly in front of your vehicle as if from nowhere. Either all the cars in front of you are gonna hit it first, or you aren't paying enough attention. On a side note, a massive pothole will cause a horrendous accident at pretty much any speed greater than 30 mph. Would you recommend everyone drive around at that speed all the time in the off chance that a random pothole could spring up from nowhere? Do you stop flying because some planes crash? Do you stop going on trains because some get derailed? I mean, at some point, you need to simply draw the line and acknowledge that "high velocity == some degree of risk" and simply go with it.
That's half the problem. The other half is just plain ignorance and lack of road manners. Many studies have been run that show that the #1 cause of road rage on the road is obstruction in the passing lane. And other studies have been done that show road rage to be one of the leading causes of traffic accidents. Road rage leads even good drivers to do incredibly stupid things, often if only to attempt to accentuate a point (hence the cutting off). If people would get off their high horses, obey road manners and use a passing lane as it is intended to be used, alot less of the "speed demons" would be raging and there would be considerably reduced accidents.
Believe me, the "wildly swerving, passing on the right, close passing" behavior is not normal, nor do most people who engage in it wish to (I know, I'm one of them). The problem is that others on the road make it impossible not to. If you want to get anywhere you're going at a speed faster than 5 below the speed limit, you need to attempt to pass on the right. Then, if you're in a situation where some jackass can't pick a speed and is increasing and decreasing speed randomly, or passing the guy next to him at .5 mph speed difference, you often need to be able to quickly maneuver through traffic, lest you get blocked behind a fast apparoaching roadblock in the right lanes...how do you think jams occur? A single person makes the left lane completely inaccessible...thus, traffic normally meant for 4 lanes of traffic is forced to converge into 3. This increased congestion decreases the odds of anyone actually passing through the jam, which only increases pileup. Eventually, the entire clog is nearly completely unpassable because a single moron refuses to yield and considerable traffic makes navagiating the right lanes nearly impossible.
Is it so much to ask that a person use the left lane only for passing as it was meant to be? Or hell, if you want to cruise there, at least occasionally look behind you and yield to faster traffic? If you want to be lazy and zone out on the road (dangerous if you ask me), don't do it in the fast lane. It's very simple...if you look to your right and you aren't passing anybody, you better not be in the left lane. Nothing amazes me more when someone is in the passing lane and an entire STACK of cars passes them on the right...then you look behind you, and lo and behold, they STILL are sitting there in the left lane, having not gotten the picture. Frankly, I believe it's ignorance. Sheer ignorance. Or maybe senility. At any rate, they don't belong on the road.
Man, where did I leave that grue costume?
Try F.E.A.R at 1600x1200 resolution w/ all details on high.
Believe me, software has most certainly outpaced hardware. Now you yourself might be happy playing all your games at 800 x 600 with medium detail, no shadows, and no anti-aliasing, but some ppl like the immersive experience. They're the same kind of people who are into HD everything and multi-speaker surround sound.
Now, while I agree spending this kind of money on a processor is utterly ridiculous (I have a 3000+ myself), I also don't believe newer games wouldn't take advantage of faster processors (or faster GPUs for that matter...they sorta go hand-in-hand).
On the contrary, this is precisely where democracy fails. Two party systems and "package deals" (ala "platforms") force us to take the bad with the good. You pick the issue most important to you and swallow the rest of the bitterness.
So, in my example, if the current administration manages to blow a hole in (and the sink) the assinine Social Security program and/or Medicare/Medicaid/Welfare while they're at it, I'll consider the restricted freedoms a decent trade for all my wasted money. Then I'll vote for a democrat to get the freedoms back, and pray they don't go gungho on Communistic programs again.
Alas, such is life.
Mmmmm, gumball thrusters *drool*
They should totally use "Jump Right In" as the theme song in their commercials.
Well, for one, the poster of this submission states that optional garbage collection IS one of the proposed additions in C++0x, so I don't know where this complaint is coming from. On top of that, if you really did want the equivalent of garbage collection, just use Boost smart pointers for any heap allocations.
the lack of import declarations
Why should this require language changes? Just get (or develop) an IDE that generates the headers for you. Problem solved. This seems like more laziness. There's perfectly sensible reasons to separate the headers from the code.
no properties
Just make class variables protected or public and access them directly. Accessors really are not that important. Frankly, I don't believe in encapsulation for the sake of encapsulation. Most of the time, it simply obfuscates things. Hell, most of the reason I can't stand java to this day is because I tired of dealing with constructs like this:
system.subsystem.lang.util.math.random.Plus(myclas s.GetInteger().intValue(),myclass2.GetInteger().in tValue()) // exaggeration intended.
It's bad enough that Java is too stupid to auto-cast Integers and "int" when it has hundreds of functions that deal exclusively with each. At least if the Integer class had the "int" variable not within a damn accessor, each line of my code might actually be shorter than 80 chars *smirk*
No closures
It is possible to carry over functional programming style into C++, including closures, lambda-expressions, and currying. It's just not pretty. And honestly, I see no reason for it being there. C++ is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a functional programming language. Why not just code in Scheme or Ocaml if that's what you want? Most C programmers can't stand the sight of those constructs.
For example, a button with an optional bitmap would be constructed in one line of code, like this: new Button(parent = mainWindow, text = "hello world", bitmap = bitmap1, click = {mainWindow.close()});.
How is that any different than "new Button(mainWindow, "hello world", bitmap1, &mainWindow.close)", with a single constructor on the backend? And if you really wanted to allow for a dynamic situation, what's wrong with instantiating an object and then manually assigning the values? You could even put them all on one line if you wanted: myButton = newButton(); myButton.text = "hellow world", etc etc...
C++ could have been the dominant language, if it was not for the stubborness of the C++ committee to accept that programming languages are developed based on what the world needs, and not on what a few good men know.
Many of your complaints seem to stem from the fact that alot of functional dogma has not carried over into C++ (such as continuations and closures). Last I recall, functional programming represented a very small subset of the programming populace ("what a few good men know"). Most programmers simply don't think that way. Anyways, most problems that call for a functional solution are better done in other languages anyways.
Alot of the other things you mention would be nice though.
That depends on whether or not I'm guilty :)
Step 4 is "Evil", right?